about reality .. whatever is out there for us (humans) is based on vision, touch, smell, hear and taste. Are we SURE, it's like that?

the world we deal with is based on our mind's interpretation of the 5 senses. We see things, yet we know we can only see a small part of the total spectrum, we hear, yet our audible frequeny range is short as compared to the full one, we taste, yet our tongue is the only sensor, we smell, yet we only have one nose and we touch, although we have a lot of sensors at the finger tips, we use other body parts to have the 'feel' of things ..
have we ever thought if that is it? i mean what we perceive the world to be, is it actually like that? don't these 5 senses make us believe the world is like what we have now? is the colour red actually red?

Aug 13 2012:
I have another sense that comes to me through my "feelings" (as opposed to emotions). I would be lost without it. I call it my inner voice or my guidance system. It operates independent of my beliefs. It offers information but does not judge.

This means that the world that I live in is very different from the world that you live in.

Jul 15 2012:
We are limited by evolution. Evolution is strictly about survival, nothing more. There could be all kinds of entities all about us that have no affect on our survival, and there would be no reason for us to sense them. For the sake of discussion, lets say that there are ghosts roaming about the earth constantly. These ghosts cannot have any affect on us and so have zero affect on our survival. Now if an organism mutated and developed a sense that could detect ghosts, perhaps this sense had the negative effect of causing the organism to be distracted from its normal business. So any organisms with this sense did not survive. That is just one example. We have absolutely no way of knowing what may exist that we cannot sense. We know of matter and dark matter. There could be any number of types of stuff that we know nothing about because our limited senses have not permitted us to find them.

So this is not just about how we perceive the universe, it is also about the contents of the universe.

Jul 14 2012:
Reality is person dependent We've evolved to see the universe the way it is especially with eyesight. Using eyes an example, our sun spews out mainly visible light as opposed to gamma etc according to Stephen Hawking's books. So we've evolved in a place where light is the main thing hitting the body and we've evolved around that to see in light. There are also many disadvantages with seeing in gamma or in xray i.e you'd be able to see through things yet if you went to reach for it you may find that you can't because there may be something like skin or a wall which couldn't reflect the waves as gamma and x rays are highly penetrable. So we see reality in one of the best ways.

Jul 15 2012:
I think reality is something that should be absolute and not dependent on something or someone. This is the whole point of me asking this question. There must be a reason why ALL of us call it REALITY. It should not be person dependent because it is real. Therefore, let us try to understand it more and more.

Jul 15 2012:
Reality is person dependent, it's a fact, the theory of relativity shows this. Now it's very easy to describe why we all perceive reality in roughly the same way, it's because we live on the same planet, experience the same gravity etc. But imagine you lived your entire life near a black hole, you'd become accustomed to time and gravity etc there, but if you came to Earth everything would appear to be happening so much quicker and gravity to you would be so much weaker EDITED : added this is for clarification. By everything would happen quicker I'm not sure if it means that you'd perceive birds to be flying extremely fast or something, and I'm not sure of this part because no physics book has addressed this part. But there are two things I do know, if a person living near a black hole visited Earth they would die quicker, that's due to time's relativity, and also, if a person near a black hole could make a telescope big enough to see humans walking on Earth, then it would definitely look to them as though time had sped up and humans walked at 20 meters per second. And we all call it reality because we want to all to be real.

Jul 15 2012:
Frans,
Motivation for me is our body's response in terms of energy to a stimulus. We feel motivated when things we like happen around us, to/with us or our loved ones etc. On the contrary, we feel demotivated when this does not happen. I feel that a new born will not understand the meaning of motivation, but as he or she goes on, he/she starts realizing what stimulates positive motivation and what does not. The mind (as I have said earlier) is an excellent machine which recognizes patterns and trends, stores them for us so that we can base our future decisions based on those (mostly). Therefore, motivation is also something that varies a lot from one person to another. A free $10 bill might not motivate a businessman, but will for sure motivate a waiter or a taxi driver.
Although it is one of the difficult things to achieve with today's limited knowledge of materials and computers, but I think we can program a robot to recognize patterns and constantly evolve. It can be programmed to recognize positive stimulus and negative stimulus.

Jul 14 2012:
Humanity may have a particular common view of the world based on our shared perceptions.
But there are things that we can see at work, but not actually see(like the law of gravity at work or the waves)

Jul 14 2012:
reality = perception+ belief , belief = norms+values, norms and values are created by society, so whatever society has taught us to see, believe and think is reality for us, it is not individual it is socially constructed

Jul 14 2012:
There have been people who were born in the wild whose parents have died and they were raised by wild animals. The fact that they survived for years in the wild is a good indication that their senses provided them with a realistic notion of their environment. Perception is not constructed solely by society.

Jul 14 2012:
society is not just collection of individuals, perception of reality is heavily depended on what has been stored in brain, for instance water lake is reality but it perceived differently by crocodile and zebra. if we had common perception of reality our houses should be of same design, like birds have common design for their nest. the children raised by wild animals learned things from that wild animals and thus, their perception of reality become animal like, they started eating food like animal or they started walking like animal, so perception is either taught by some one or learned from someone and that someone is society, not necessarily human society :)

Jul 14 2012:
Talking about sight, they say that 'there is a veil on our eyes beyond which we cannot see'. I think i believe in this. We cannot see microwaves, EM radiation, radio waves and a lot of others. I have talked to different people on this topic, and they believe that we have been only given that range of senses, which is required to be used in this world to lead a peaceful life.
Indeed our mind (the control hub) is a very powerful machine that controls almost everything. But again, the nerve cells and fats that constitute our brain are nothing without our soul, which is what we have 'in' our body in this this world. We don't know what happens to the soul after one dies. Different cultures and religions have different views, with some in common.
If we make a robot having all these five senses with very good processing speeds and storage capacity,can it replace us? i don't know yet!

Jul 14 2012:
But what the robot cannot do with the five senses and teraflops of processing speed is "Imagine". Take for example that we can look at a horse and a bird as two different things but in our mind we can fantasize a flying horse :) Never in our lives have we seen a flying horse but we can imagine it.

Jul 14 2012:
interesting !
but still you and me an only fantasize a flying horse if we have seen both with our eyes and he images are stored in our minds .. imagine a person born blind, an he or she still imagine a flying horse? likewise, a robot can be programmed to 'imagine' .. imagination to me is nothing but ideas generated in our minds through data acquired through the same 5 senses, stored and by making various permutations and combinations of the same. I believe a robot an be programmed to do the same. what do you think?

All of this hinges on perspective. We first obtain our perspective from our culture, a group of people bound by similar characteristics. We, as audio and visual creatures, need to be able to name and identify the things we come in contact with. So each of our cultures begin to classify the things around us. You can notice the difference in language, in particular the meaning of words, in religion to a certain extint and even our morals. Now there certainly are also similarities between these cultures, but that is mainly because we are all from the same species.

Our perception of the world is true because we created it (the perspective that is). This is one of the reasons for conflicts between cultures, the differences in perspective (but now I am just getting off topic). If another form of life was able to communicate with us, I am sure that would say the world is much different than what we believe, but that is because that form of life has a completely different perspective. Until then, the world as we know will remain how we see it.

Jul 13 2012:
The confines of the 3-dimensional universe that we live in is just the limitations of what our body is limited to, but not our mind. The universe we live in is made to perfectly have the forces of the universe to create the world we live in, the moon, the sun, the stars, etc. anything and everything in the universe. The power of our mind is staggering, but the problem is that the brain is limited to only the confines of what our 3-dimensional body can experience with it's 5 senses. It can take that information, process it, and then make connections, but the only source of energy, of information is from the 3-dimensional universe. If the mind was free of the confines of 3-dimensional bodies, then the mind would be much more powerful.